Drum Fill Of The Week #86

This week’s drum fill takes a common idea – 3 note groupings – and applies it to 16th notes. Check it out.

Drum Fill Of The Week #86

The part of this drum fill you may find tricky, is that it starts with the Left Hand. Drum fills starting with the left hand can open up the kit for you in a different way to if you always start with the right.

Learn The Fill

The drum fill is built on a 3 note grouping – Left Left Right (LLR). We’re just applying that grouping to 16th notes and then moving it around the kit. Let’s get used to playing LLR over a bar of 16th notes first.

LLR all the way

So over a bar of 16th notes in 4/4 we get 5 lots of “LLR” and one additional Left to end the bar. Practice playing this pattern slowly with a metronome and count all the 16th notes while you do it.

Now lets add some accents to it to give it some shape. You’ll note that we’re accenting all the Rights (R) and the final Left.

Let me hear those accents!

Accents help to bring drum fills to life. Try to make the accents stand out and drop the volume of the non accented notes a bit.

Now lets move some of the accents around the kit.

Hit those toms.

This already sounds like a pretty cool drum fill, but to spice it up a little, lets move the left hand between the hi-hat and snare.

The final fill.

Take It Further

There are so many ways to move this pattern around the kit. Here’s 3 I like:

All change.

The first drum fill just changes the order in which the left hand hits the snare and hi-hat. Instead of hi-hat first, we go snare first.

The second drum fill the right hand now plays the toms first and then snare. This allows us to include the 2nd tom in the middle and to end on the floor tom.

The final drum fill just has the right hand moving in a clockwise direction around the kit from the snare and then come back to the snare at the end.

Play around with this pattern yourself and come up with your own version.

I hope you’ve liked drum fill of the week #86. If you’re in Singapore and you’d like a free trial drum lesson, send us a message via the contact us page.